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Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence, or perhaps it must be reliably formed, or perhaps there is some other ‘good-making’ features it must have. But does a belief’s justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists insist that such awareness is required for justification whereas externalists insist that it is not. The first part of this book argues that internalism faces an inescapable dilemma: either it leads to vicious regress problems and, ultimately, radical skepticism or it is entirely unmotivated. The second part of the book begins by developing the author’s own externalist theory of justification, one imposing both a proper function and a no-defeater requirement. It concludes by demonstrating the failure of two prominent critiques of externalism: that it is infected with epistemic circularity and that it cannot respond adequately to skepticism. Together, the two parts of the book provide a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism.

This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study, asking what it tells us about the human mind. It lays the foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. It introduces Chomsky's program of a ‘minimalist’ syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. It explains how the Minimalist Program originated from work in cognitive science, biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications for work in these fields. It also considers the way the human mind is designed when seen as an arrangement of structural patterns in nature, and argues that its design is the product not so much of adaptive evolutionary history as of principles and processes that are historical and internalist in character. The book suggests that linguistic meaning arises in the mind as a consequence of structures emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this, the book substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of human nature. It also provides an insight into the nature and aims of Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

This book defends a conception of the mind that is inspired by some of Descartes's writings. The crucial feature of the Cartesian view defended is not dualism — which is not adopted here — but internalism about the mind. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted thesis of externalism, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view that the mind is autonomous with respect to its environment: although it is obviously influenced by things in the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. The first part of the book argues that privileged accessibility is the mark of the mental, and that this thesis is strongly tied to criteria of personhood. The second part argues that internalism is best formulated as the thesis that mental features are determined by the phenomenal properties of our conscious mental life, and that the externalist denial of this thesis is incompatible with privileged self-knowledge. Hence, externalism is in conflict with the conception of the mind and personhood defended in the first part of the book. Supporters of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; this book answers these criticisms and argues for an uncompromising internalist Cartesian theory of the mind.

Externalism about mental content is the view that things outside of the skin or in the past are constitutive parts of present mental states. Internalism is the denial of externalism. This book propounds a plausible physicalist internalism, called qualia empiricism. Qualia empiricism is the conjunction of a modal structuralist account of perceptual experience, an account of the content contributed to thought by referring terms that deploys rigidified description clusters, and an account of non-epistemic internal resources that can bridge those first two elements. It also argues that externalism is supported by no reasons that withstand close scrutiny. These include case-based arguments and arguments entwined with externalist accounts of perceptual states and language. The book critically considers externalist arguments rooted in work by Putnam, Kripke, Burge, Millikan, Dretske, Papineau, Prinz, Fodor, Harman, Stampe, Stalnaker, Tye, Kant, Williamson, disjunctivists, Wittgenstein, Wright, Davidson, and Brandom, among others.

This book examines some recent answers to the questions of how and where to draw the divide between semantics (roughly, features of the literal meaning of linguistic items) and pragmatics (roughly, features emerging from the context within which such items are being used). In particular, the book defends what is commonly known as ‘minimal semantics’ (aka ‘semantic invariantism’ or ‘insensitive semantics’). Minimal semantics, as the name suggests, offers a pretty minimal account of the inter-relation between semantics and pragmatics. Specifically, it holds that while context can affect literal semantic content in the case of genuine (i.e. lexically or syntactically marked) context-sensitive items (e.g. indexicals, demonstratives, tense markers), this is the extent of pragmatic influence within the semantic realm. Minimalism, then, prohibits what are here called ‘free pragmatic effects’: putative effects on semantic content which are not required by any lexico‐syntactic item in a sentence. The book opens with an exploration of the current positions in this debate, introducing the main approaches of minimalism, indexicalism, contextualism, relativism, and occasionalism and offers some initial reasons for being concerned about many of the positions opposing minimalism. The main arguments against minimalism are then explored, looking at the argument that minimal contents are explanatorily irrelevant, the argument that at least some sentences fail to express minimal contents, and the argument that the kinds of word meanings which minimalism requires are either impossible or explanatorily inadequate. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that none of these arguments are compelling and that minimalism in fact provides an attractive and plausible account of the literal meanings of natural language sentences.

This book comprises eleven chapters which engage with, or take their point of departure from, the influential work in moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1929–2003). Various themes of Williams's work are explored and taken in new directions. The chapters are all concerned with Williams's work on the viability or wisdom of systematic moral theory, and his criticism, in particular, of moral theory's preoccupation with impartiality. Some chapters address Williams's work on moral luck, and his insistence that moral appraisals bear a disquieting sensitivity to various kinds of luck. One chapter makes further connections between moral luck and the ‘non-identity problem’ in reproductive ethics. Other chapters investigate Williams's defence of ‘internalism’ about reasons for action, which makes our reasons for action a function of our desires, projects, and psychological dispositions. One chapter attempts to plug a gap in Williams's theory which is created by Williams's deference to imagination, while another chapter connects these issues to Williams's accommodation of ‘thick’ ethical concepts as a source of knowledge and action-guidingness. A further chapter examines Williams's less-known work on the other central normative concept, ‘ought’. Another chapter takes a look at Williams's work on moral epistemology and intuitionism, comparing and contrasting his work with that of John McDowell, and Gerald Lang explores Williams's work on equality, discrimination, and interspecies relations in order to reach the conclusion, similar to Williams's, theory that ‘speciesism’ is very unlike racism or sexism.

This is a collection of chapters by the leading proponent of process reliabilism, explaining its relation to rival and/or neighboring theories including evidentialism, other forms of reliabilism, and virtue epistemology. It addresses other prominent themes in contemporary epistemology, such as the internalism/externalism debate, the epistemological upshots of experimental challenges to intuitional methodology, the source of epistemic value, and social epistemology. The Introduction addresses late-breaking responses to ongoing exchanges with friends, rivals, and critics of reliabilism.

This book challenges the traditional picture of the skeptic who asks, “Why be moral?” and demands a demonstration that acting in morally required ways is rationally required. It argues that we defeat the action skeptic, as well as the disposition skeptic, who denies that being morally disposed is rationally required, and the motive skeptic, who believes that merely going through the motions in acting morally is rationally permissible. It argues, against internalism, that we address the amoralist, who is not moved by moral reasons he recognizes. It argues for expanding the skeptic's position from self-interest to privilege, to include morally unjustified behavior typically directed against disenfranchised social groups. It argues for revising the traditional expected utility model of rationality to exclude desires deformed by patriarchy as ones it is not irrational to have. It defends the Interdependency Thesis, which assesses the rationality of moral dispositions and of actions interdependently, and allows us to fine tune the demands of the skeptic by not focusing on acts and dispositions in themselves, but on their interconnection. It defends the view that our rational assessments of agents should reflect the complex connection between the agent's reasons for adopting a moral disposition, and for having and acting from it, whether these cohere with her reasons for acting and for wanting to be a morally good person, and the justification for the moral theory or principles she endorses. Acts come in degrees of rationality, as measured by how they contribute to the agent's consistent life plan.

One of the key supposed ‘platitudes’ of contemporary epistemology is the claim that knowledge excludes luck. One can see the attraction of such a claim, in that knowledge is something that one can take credit for; it is an achievement of sorts, and yet luck undermines genuine achievements. The problem, however, is that luck seems to be an all-pervasive feature of our epistemic enterprises that tempts us to think that either scepticism is true, and we don’t know very much after all, or else knowledge is compatible with knowledge after all. My claim is that we do not need to choose between these two austere alternatives, since a closer inspection of what is involved in the notion of epistemic luck reveals varieties of luck that are compatible with knowledge possession and varieties that aren’t. We can thus do justice to the intuition that knowledge is compatible with (some forms of) luck without acceding to the sceptical claim that we do not know as much as we think we do. Nevertheless, I also claim that there is a sceptical problem lurking in the background that is related to the problem of epistemic luck, though it is not best thought of in terms of the possession of knowledge.

While much has been written on Descartes' theory of mind and ideas, no systematic study of his theory of sensory representation and misrepresentation is currently available in the literature. This book is an ambitious attempt to fill this gap. It argues against the established view that Cartesian sensations are mere qualia by defending the view that they are representational; it offers a descriptivist-causal account of their representationality that is critical of, and differs from, all other extant accounts (such as, for example, causal, teleofunctional and purely internalist accounts); and it has the advantage of providing an adequate solution to the problem of sensory misrepresentation within Descartes' internalist theory of ideas. In sum, the book offers a novel account of the representationality of Cartesian sensations; provides a panoramic overview, and critical assessment, of the scholarly literature on this issue; and places Descartes' theory of sensation in the central position it deserves among the philosophical and scientific investigations of the workings of the human mind.

The essays in this book defend evidentialism. This is the view that whether a person is epistemically justified in believing a proposition is determined entirely by the person's evidence. Fundamentally, it is a supervenience thesis according to which facts about whether or not a person is epistemically justified in believing a proposition supervene on facts describing the evidence that person has. According to evidentialism, epistemic evaluations are distinct from moral and prudential evaluations of believing, and epistemically justified beliefs may fail to be morally or prudentially valuable. The evidence to which the theory refers includes other justified beliefs and, ultimately, experiences. While evidentialism is not an inherently anti-skeptical view, we argue that people do have knowledge level justification for many beliefs. Several essays in the volume criticize rival theories of justification, notably externalist theories such as reliabilism.

Unless he has very strong reason for supposing that there is a God, a theist needs a theodicy (or at least needs to begin to develop one) in order justifiably to believe that there is a God. Part 2 of this book describes the good goals that God might be seeking to produce in his Universe—beauty; creatures having knowledge (in a largely internalist sense), having their good desires satisfied, with a free will to do actions that promote each others’ well‐being, being of use to others, and worshipping God. Part 3 shows how the possibility of moral evil, and the actual occurrence of natural evil (providing knowledge of possible good and bad actions, and the scope for good response) are necessary to secure these ends. God has the right to allow some creatures to suffer for the benefit of others, so long as he compensates them in this life or after death. The expected value of allowing the evils in order to achieve the good goals is positive.

A collection about the intentionality of speech acts and propositional attitudes. The chapters in the first section develop a framework for pragmatics—the study of the interaction of speech acts and the contexts in which they are performed. The framework is used to defend and apply a pragmatic conception of presupposition, to account for the role of indicative conditional statements in reasoning, and to solve some puzzles about statements of identity and existence. The chapters in the second section concern the semantics of the attribution of belief and other propositional attitudes. They attempt to reconcile the possible‐worlds analysis of propositional content with the phenomena, including de re belief attribution and the attribution of indexical or self‐locating belief. The chapters in the third section defend an externalist account of the contents of thought. It is argued that there is no reason to think a viable account of narrow content can be developed, and that none is needed to provide an adequate account of the role of intentional content in the explanation of behaviour and experience. The chapters in the fourth section discuss the relation between the content of thoughts and the forms in which content is represented and expressed. It is argued that the temptation to build linguistic structure into the content of thought should be resisted since it does not provide the material for an adequate solution to the problems that plague the possible‐worlds conception of proposition, such as the problem of logical omniscience.

Practical Reality is about the relation between the reasons why we do things and the reasons why we should. It claims that, in order to understand this relation, we have to abandon current conceptions of the reasons why we act—our motivating reasons, as they are commonly called—as mental states of ourselves. Belief/desire explanations of action, or even purely cognitive accounts in terms of beliefs alone, drive too great a wedge between the normative and the motivational. Instead, we have to understand a motivating reason as the sort of thing that could be a good reason, for instance, that the train is about to leave. This, rather than my belief that the train is about to leave, must be my reason for running. Motivating reasons are not mental states of the agent, but states of affairs.

Explores issues ranging from introspection to social epistemology. “Internalism Exposed” pinpoints problems in the defense of internalism as an approach to epistemic justification. “A Priori Warrant and Naturalistic Epistemology” argues that naturalistic epistemology is compatible with a priori warrant, and shows how scientific research supports an innate faculty of number cognition that can generate arithmetic belief with a priori warrant. “The Unity of the Epistemic Virtues” examines the prospects for a unifying account of distinct epistemic values, such as justified belief and true belief. The next three papers consider intuitions and introspection from an epistemological perspective. One paper explains how intuitions can play the evidential role that philosophical practice assigns to it. Two papers argue that introspection plays an unavoidable but legitimate role in the science of consciousness despite being a “private” method. The final three papers deal with aspects of social epistemology. One asks how novices can justifiably choose among two or more competing experts. Another explores the possibility of an epidemiology of knowledge, of which memetics is a prominent example. The final paper provides a critical survey and guide to the diverse approaches to social epistemology.

Among the many practical failures that threaten us, weakness of will or akrasia is often considered to be a paradigm of irrationality. The eleven new essays in this collection give a rich overview of the current debate over weakness of will and practical irrationality more generally. Issues covered include classical questions such as the distinction between weakness of will and compulsion, the connection between evaluative judgement and motivation, the role of emotions in akrasia, rational agency, and the existence of the will. They also include new topics, such as group akrasia, strength of will, the nature of correct choice, the structure of decision theory, the temporality of prudential reasons, and emotional rationality. The essays advance two central tasks: exploration of the implications of akrasia and other putatively irrational phenomena for the nature of practical reason and rationality; and consideration of possible explanations for such phenomena. The former intersects with recent theorizing about the nature of practical reason in general, and the latter with work in the philosophy of mind about the kinds of mental states and entities we need to posit in order adequately to understand human action.

Modern disputes about what makes a belief epistemically justified or rational are flawed through failing to recognize that there are different kinds of justifications that are in different ways indicative that the belief is true. I distinguish synchronic justification (the belief being a justified response to the believer's situation at the time) from diachronic justification (the belief constituting a justified response to adequate investigation over time); and, for each of these kinds, internalist justification (justification by introspectible factors) from externalist justification (justification by factors not necessarily accessible to the believer). A belief is internally synchronically justified if it is rendered inductively probable by the believer's basic beliefs; but ‘inductively probable’ may mean probable by true a priori standards (logically probable), by true standards to the best of the believer's ability to discover this (epistemically probable), or simply by the believer's own standards (subjectively probable). External synchronic justification is normally a matter of being produced by a reliable process, and there are many different ways of spelling that out. A belief is diachronically justified to the extent to which it results from adequate investigation. This depends (positively) on how probable it was that investigation would lead to evidence that would make a difference to the original probability of the belief; how probable it was that the issue was important; and (negatively) on how probable it was that investigation would cost much time and money. But all these ‘probabilities’ can be spelled out in different internalist and externalist ways. Almost all these kinds of justification are worth having, because it is logically probable that a belief justified in almost all these ways will be true. This account of justification is extended to give an account of different kinds of knowledge, all of which are worth having.